[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

[geni]

On 9/18/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> I think you have it exactly wrong.
>
> *  Wikimedia Foundation is not about the English Wikipedia. If it was,
> the other projects should get out of the Wikimedia Foundation asap
> because it would make it the wrong place to grow their project.

The language barrier tends to result in the foundation being less
involved on other projects. Can you imagine what would happen if en
had the same issues with the verifiability policy as ru? the odds are
we would be being asked some pretty tough question by the foundation.
How many other projects have an equivalent to [[en:Wikipedia:Office
Actions]]?

> * It would be good to discriminate against the English Wikipedia because
> it gets too much attention. The alternative is that it cannot look after
> itself. If this is the case the project should organise itself and not
> be dependant on outside control.

Again the foundation is unlikely to allow this. In practice you should
hope the en does not focus on exclusively looking after it self
(although for a number of reasons that would be pretty much impossible
for this to happen) and considers itself as part of a greater project.

> * Even the Neapolitan wikipedia has had articles in the Italian National
> Press. This is certainly true for all the bigger projects. If you think
> that the domination of the English wikipedia is so self evident, think
> again most of what happens around the other projects you do not know
> about.

OK lets look at some international figures:

en dominates the alexa results:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=wikipedia.org&url=wikipedia.org

other than a brief appearance by de en dominates the search results:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=en.wikipedia.org%2C+es.wikipedia.org%2C+de.wikipedia.org%2C+fr.wikipedia.org%2C+Ja.wikipedia.org&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all




> Also the growth of the other projects is faster than the English
> project. It will not take long and the other projects will be
> substantially bigger.
>

Combined I think they already are in terms of number of articles.
Individually nothing is going to challenge en any time soon.

> If you choose a board member only because you think he or she is
> "nice".. you might consider if he of she will also be effective and do
> good for ALL the projects.

I tend towards the "vote for anyone I consider competent" approach.

-- 
geni